Finishing Up The Krishna Thing

So what lesson is to be taken from the rise and fall of the Hare Krishna religious experience in the 1980s? Beware of self-identified gurus with firearms and drinking problems? Perhaps it is a tad more complicated than that. Today’s Hare Krisna movement is decidedly more staid and respectable than it was a couple of decades ago. Whereas devotees formerly were discouraged from maintaining ties with the outside world, including their own families, Hare Krishnas today mix and mingle like anyone else and don robes and Sanskrit names only while at temple for services. And speaking of the temples it is not unusual today to see young people in jeans and t-shirts worship alongside middle-aged white men in saffron robes and Indian immigrants in flowing saris. ISKCON communities also now offer premarital counseling, participate in interfaith activities, run social service programs, and offer babysitting--just the kind of institutionalization early converts were fleeing-but totally in line with what a fundamentalist Christian church might offer to its congregants. This change was due in no small part to a massive exodus by adherents in the wake of the scandals in LA and New Vrindiban which paved the way for a reformist movement and allowed it to gain traction. At the same time, things like yoga, vegetarianism, chanting, and concepts like karma and reincarnation became more mainstream and accepted by American society so that the Krishnas seem no stranger today than Tibetan Buddhists.

Maybe the bigger lesson is that investing absolute spiritual power in an imperfectly realized guru is a clear path to excess and abuse, not to mention the fact that requiring celibacy as a condition for initiation seemingly always leads to some sort of trouble. Maybe the Krishnas should borrow more from the Buddhists with their history of mind to mind transmission, and less from the Catholics with their rigid hierarchies. Verifiable spiritual attainment should be a prerequisite for any teaching position within any religion, lest we, as men, fall prey to our baser instincts.